Meredith L. Patterson, M.A., M.S.

The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search
engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building
blocks of life itself.

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer
programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically
altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of
melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet
food deadly.

“People can really work on projects for the good of humanity while
learning about something they want to learn about in the process,” she
said.

Meredith L. Patterson, M.A., M.S.
is a polymath technologist and science fiction author.
She has spoken at numerous industry conferences on a wide range of
topics. She is also a prolific blogger and software developer, and a
leading figure in the biopunk movement.

Meredith is known for her work in computational linguistics and its
applications to computer security. In 2005, she presented the first
parse tree validation technique for stopping SQL injection attacks at
the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas with the paper
Stopping Injection Attacks with Computational Theory.

She has integrated her support vector machine datamining library inside
of PostgreSQL to provide a “query-by-example” extension to the SQL
language, allowing DBAs to quickly and easily form complex datamining
requests based on example positive and negative inputs. While this work
was initially funded by Google’s Summer of Code program, her
datamining work now forms the basis of her startup, Osogato, which
couples the datamining database with acoustic feature extractors
allowing users to create playlists from their own music collections and
find new music based on the inherent properties of the music they
provide as sample inputs. Osogato was launched at SuperHappyDevHouse.

Prior to founding Osogato, Meredith worked for Mu Security (now Mu
Dynamics). Before that, she was a
Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa.
She did her undergrad in linguistics at the University of Houston and
received her Masters in linguistics from the University of
Iowa.

Meredith has contributed to multiple open-source database software
projects, including SciTools, Klein, QBE, and written patches
to PostgreSQL. Her
Dejector library integrates with PostrgreSQL to
implement the SQL injection approach taken in her Black Hat paper.
She is also credited with contributing to the Summer of Code
project
Firekeeper.

Meredith frequently
blogs about
such issues as copyright reform,
biohacking, the Military Commissions Act, Proposition 8 and
civil rights issues, and programming languages on her personal
blog. She has also contributed multiple articles to the popular
blog BoingBoing.

In addition to her professional work as a bioinformaticist for
Integrated DNA Technologies, she is a key figure in the biohacker
movement, and has collaborated with her husband to design
glow-in-the-dark yogurt using GFP plasmids. She is also working on other
synthetic biology projects, such as creating a low-cost melamine
contamination field test, and a strain of yogurt bacteria that completes
the metabolic pathway for vitamin C, to prevent scurvy. She is a
regular contributor to the DIYbio group discussions and a user of the
OpenWetWare wiki.

Meredith lives and works in San Francisco, California. A two-time
CodeCon presenter, she married the co-organizer of the event, Len
Sassaman, after a public proposal at CodeCon 2006.
She serves in the California Army National Guard as a second
lieutenant.
She enjoys knitting, sewing, and target shooting.